Bodies in the City, 1100-1800 Book Series

Bodies in the City, 1100-1800 is the dedicated book series coming out of the Focus Program and will be published by Routledge.

Bodies in the City, 1100-1800 investigates the complex, diverse, and multi-layered realities and understandings of ‘the body’ in medieval and early modern societies. The series encompasses various disciplines – art, architecture, literature, medicine, politics, religion, gender, society – and focuses on archival, textual, visual and environmental materials. The time-period covered, 1100-1800, corresponds to a crucial period for the development of European urban centres and cultures. Within this framework the series will explore very diverse yet coherent studies, aiming to speak to each other in thought-provoking ways.

The series aims to intersect and to energise two strands in historical studies: the pre-modern city as an historical subject (encompassing political institutions, rituals, built environments and religious activities) and histories of the premodern body with their debates about how bodies are shaped by discourse and context. While there are numerous studies of the body in history, this series explores critically and in innovative ways the relationship between bodies and environments. Emphasizing novel approaches to vernacular sources, authors will analyse how particular spaces, locations and physical milieux affect understandings of the body and govern responses to particular problems. The multi-disciplinary approach to the topic places the series at the leading edge of its field.

The editorial board has evolved out of an established research grouping of scholars and is led by experts in the field. All members of the editorial board have collaborated over a number of years through the Prato Consortium of Medieval and Renaissance Studies (Amsterdam, Arizona, Catholic University of America, Edinburgh, University of London (Birkbeck and Queen Mary), Toronto, Warwick, Prato State Archives), and have together generated the conceptual and research framework which the series seeks to promote.

The composition of the editorial board extends its reach into Britain, France, Spain, and northern and central Europe, ensuring that the series will offer a pan-European, trans-national perspective.

Publications in the series will be attractive to scholars who work in medieval, renaissance and early modern history, namely, social, cultural, economic, urban, medical, environmental, political, and legal history; and archaeology, theology, and memory studies.

Volumes currently planned for the series include:

Volume 1: The Body and the City, edited by John Henderson and Peter Howard.

Volume 2: Plague and the City, edited by Lukas Engelmann, John Henderson and Christos Lynteris.

John Henderson, Professor of Italian Renaissance History at Birkbeck College, University of London, and Research Professor at Monash University Australia, is internationally known for his work on the social, medical and religious history of renaissance and early modern Italy. He has eleven sole authored and edited books with foremost publishers (Clarendon, Chicago, Yale, Syracuse, Routledge, Peter Lang, Steiner Verlag, Le Lettere); he has 39 articles and book chapters with front ranking journals and publishers; he is currently finishing a book entitled Death in Florence: Plague and society in 17th-century Tuscany (Yale University Press, London). He has been Councillor of the Royal Historical Society, and a Fellow (1984) and Robert Lehman Visiting Professor, Villa I Tatti (Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies); and is at present Fellow, Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, Director of the ‘The Medici and Medicine in Early Modern Italy’ research project, supported by MAP (the Medici before the Principate Archive, Archivio di Stato, Florence).

Peter Howard is Director of the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Monash University. He has published widely in the areas of Italian Renaissance history and medieval sermon studies, including Beyond the Written Word: Preaching and Theology in the Florence of Archbishop Antoninus (Florence: Olschki, 1995), Creating Magnificence in Renaissance Florence (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2012) and Experiencing Religion in Renaissance Florence: Theologies of the Piazza (Routledge, forthcoming). He has been a Fellow (2000-01) and Lila Wallace Reader’s Digest Visiting Professor (2007), Villa I Tatti: The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies Centre for Italian Renaissance Studies, Florence, a Fellow of the European University Institute, Florence, and a visiting scholar at the Istituto per le scienze religiose, Bologna. He currently leads the ‘Body in the City’ Focus Research Program in the Faculty of Arts, Monash University.